Ryan McLean
In the 1950s, American strategists warned of a bomber gap. By the end of that decade, the fear had shifted to a missile gap. In both cases, the perception of a gap drove enormous defense investments that ultimately formed the backbone of a credible nuclear deterrent. Today, the joint force faces a different kind of gap. It is not a deficit in capability relative to an adversary. It is a failure to connect the capabilities it already owns. A true modular open systems approach is itself a strategic deterrent—a force that can reconfigure, integrate, and adapt faster than an adversary can target it is a force that deters conflict. But the Department of Defense has not yet closed this integration gap.
The money is flowing. The tools are arriving. Integration, however, is stuck several decades in the past. Absent marked change in how it makes integration a shared government-commercial responsibility, the department faces an integration gap that risks handicapping today’s commercial modernization push as merely experimentation. Warfighters require fielded and sustained combat capability—not science projects.
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